I, Tonya (2018) - Movie Review

 

The plot: In 1994, figure skater Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) became embroiled in a media frenzy surrounding an attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver). Intercut with “documentary footage” of Tonya, her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and her mother LaVona (Allison Janney), the characters involved talk about what led up to that incident, from Tonya’s childhood to her achievements in figure skating, right down to just how much of that particular attack she was aware of at the time. It seems that, even for a story that has gone down into pop culture legend, there is still a lot left unsaid.

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016) - Movie Review

The current trend in British cinema that seems to crop up every year is adapting popular British TV comedies to the big screen. From Mrs. Brown’s Boys to The Inbetweeners, even just to characters from those shows like Keith Lemon, this seems to be the big predictable avenue for the cinematic output of the UK. It is also, to no surprise of anyone who has seen the majority of these films, a trend that yields little if any genuinely entertaining work. Okay, the first Inbetweeners movie was decent, but otherwise it’s a pretty basic guarantee for dirt-under-the-bottom-of-the-barrel crap in cinemas, or DVD if you’re even that fortunate.

So, with that in mind, it’s really worrying that the second film I’ll be covering today is an adaptation of a series that is very close to my childhood. I grew up watching Absolutely Fabulous on DVD with my mother and, if given the opportunity, I would lead a pub sing-a-long of This Wheel’s On Fire at the drop of a hat. Is this going to be another piece of dreck, or will I be so lucky as to find the one recent British TV adaptation that doesn’t suck?